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[se5a]

The people who are personally invested in Pulsar have been talking it up for a long time and nothing has ever come of it. Cata:DDA it ain't.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see it in a playable state... but I don't think it will ever get there and am not particularly motivated to sink my own time into someone else's failing project when I already enjoy Aurora as it stands. Granted, Steve took a decade to get Aurora from the first release to 6.43, but he also did it alone as a hobby that often was interrupted by real work while using a suboptimal format. Pulsar's been working in a better environment with multiple contributors since 2012 and they still don't even have the engine finished. :|

That's the sort of attitude that stops progress, seriously. it's discouraging to try work on a project and feel it's not getting anywhere, and that people who're capable of helping wont because... the snake eats it's own tail I guess.

...and also the sort of recognition that, externally, working on a game that's already cursed by the language it's written in that renders it extremely slow. Pulsar hasn't had a complete engine yet, but it's open source and a lot of the processes are already significantly faster in C# than whatever the heck aurora was written in. In the long term, it's just simply better if developers focus their efforts on that, rather than try to mess around with improving aurora as it is.

Aurora is written in Visual basic. on top of that it was started as a tool for a tabletop game that turned into a game in it's own right. so the design from the bottom up is broken. (which honestly is a vastly bigger drag on the speed than the language)

I think the big issue overall is the lack of motivation and passion into this new project, on top of the apparent lack of audience.
Also the fact that making a new engine from scratch is /hard/, especially when the people who work on it just simply can't spend as much personal time on it or even have as much experience programming it up like that. Not that I'm saying all of these are the strictest case, but it's all true for one dev or another on this project at this time.
Honestly, at least trying to contribute to the project will provide some learning experience, it's why I'm trying to read up on C# and might make some contributions in the next few months if possible. But you don't need to feel obligated to work on it if you don't want, though.

It *is* hard. it's even harder when we're using a paradigm/design/architecture that unless you're actually experienced in game development you've likely not used before. I'd not even heard of ECS before we started doing this, but having learned a bit about it, and having experienced the problems and frustrations of similar, larger game projects that used a more OO approach, I'm sold.

It's slow going and frustrating for me since the guys who know a bit more about it have gotten jobs and other life has gotten in the way, so their time has been taken away from the project, I've stalled due to being unsure of how to tackle a fairly large core part of how components should work from description of what they're capable to being able to design them to an actual ship component that affects the final ship design in the ECS environment. I was hoping one of the other guys would tackle the problem so I wouldn't have to go around in circles trying to figure it out, but as I said they've gotten busy.
So I've started re-writing an Asteroids clone that I'd half made a few years ago, using an ECS type architecture to give me a more simplified testbed to see if that'll help give me some ideas/get me unstuck.

I could dump the ECS branch and go back to working on the original branch, but I can already see future design problems, poor code (there's a serious amount of copypasta, and thousand line functions going on in there) and other problems getting in the way. 
I'd rather keep slugging away at getting an actual engine going that content can be added too, than trying to work on a spaghetti mishmash of enginecontentwtfisthiseveninthisclass?

We got a shitton of work done a few months back when we all had more free time, we even got a resharper license which has helped tremendously in keeping the code in a clean and readable state, and yeah you've kind of hit the nail on the head iceball - motivation and passion begets motivation and passion, and when some of the core workers drop out due to real life stuff it can cause a chain reaction/spiral of being unmotivated and non passion.

[Flying Dice]

I've never worked on Pulsar. I've never expressed any interest in doing so. I'm more or less satisfied with Aurora as it stands -- it's got a number of issues and some things that I'd like to be different, but that's not unusual as games go. Certainly it's still my favorite 4X by a decent margin. Why, then, is it my responsibility to cheerlead for the project if I'm not connected to or particularly interested in it, especially if a decent chunk of the people who started it either lost interest themselves or decided to prioritize other things? That sounds like the people who are still fanboying for Starbound even though most of the team has left and the ones that remain (that aren't space-fillers) are flailing about poking their audience with sticks or working on meaningless details while the project rots in development hell.

I'm not trying to deride the effort that went into Pulsar, but you've pretty much underlined the biggest issue yourself: it's been years since development started, it hasn't gone anywhere fast, it's stopped now, and a lot of the more experienced people who were involved with it... aren't anymore. It's not a bad idea or an unworkable one, but when it's essentially an indie team doing it pro bono the biggest challenge is keeping enough people on who have the right combination of time, motivation, and ability. It's not really reasonable to expect Aurora players to stay involved in Pulsar when that can't be done, because you don't even have the meager threads of "But we paid them money for it!" that you get with Early Access games that suffer the same fate.

[MrWiggles]

Does any have a link to the change log?

[QuakeIV]

Does any have a link to the change log?

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=7255.0

[MrWiggles]

Danke

[Uristides]

Decided to get into this while I wait for Stellaris to come.
I understand more or less what's happening but have no clue what I should be doing. I've been just focusing on researching cool stuff and getting mars habitable, since it's objectively the best planet in the solar system.
Meanhwile the mineral reserves on my home planet are growing shorter by the year and all I have to remedy that are half a dozen asteroid miners.
Should I be jumping around solar systems like a mad mule instead in search for earthlike planets with better minerals? I haven't even used JPs yet tbh since I didn't feel like running into aliens before I'm confident I'll not just get pwned.

[RedKing]

Yes and no. Finding perfect Earthlikes is rare. Finding colony cost x2 planets is realtively easy. But then it takes a fair bit of work to get the infrastructure, mines, factories, population, garrisons, etc. into place to really utilize them.

I typically work on getting Mars, Luna or Titan up to snuff as a secondary colony first. But if none of them have minerals, then I might look at ditching that and moving out into extrasolar colonies early, especially if there's one or more good ones within 1-2 jumps.

Although at the moment I'm playing a game with a three-empire Earth start (China, the EU, the United States) and as China I'm planning to relocate all population and assets out of the Solar System and setting up an empire around 3-4 systems a couple of jumps away from Earth before the 50-years starting truce wears off. The new capital is Tianhai (Kapteyn's Star II), an Earthlike with 92% ocean and a crapton of minerals (but no Sorium). It's a pain in the butt getting all this ready without jumpgates though (don't want to make it easy for the EU/US to get to me later).

[Sheb]

Why is it so hard? You can just park a few jumpships on the jump points no?

[andrea]

I think civilian shipping companies will only trade through jump gates, meaning he doesn't have extra income from trade, and has to move all the colonists and infrastructure manually.

[Uristides]

I see. The wiki said investing in terraforming efficiency/biology tech early wasn't optimal so I thought I was doing something wrong by trying to terraform early. Seems like I'll be chilling on Sol for quite a few years before getting to other systems.
It never passed on my head that you could have multiple empires in one planet either. That sounds interesting.

[Flying Dice]

Nah, it's good to start terraforming early, you just shouldn't bother putting much time in the techs to improve the efficiency of it until later. Just drop a +% Terraforming captain on each of the ships and a +% Terraforming governor on the planet and you're good to go.

I'll say that I have never used the biological modifications techs, partially because you then have to manage populations with different requirements, but also because a relatively recent update expanded the habitable range of gravitational fields for baseline humans (it used to be impossible to get any of the major Jovian moons to 0.00 cost, for example), which was the biggest limit on colonization. Temperatures can be shifted pretty damn heavily with the right atmospheric mixtures.

There's also nothing wrong with turtling in Sol as long as you have sufficient resources for it -- usually at minimum a couple million tons of each mineral in the total deposits of the system. That said, it can be dicey if you're down to less than a hundred thousand tons of something vital and you're just starting to search for new deposits to exploit.

Multi-empire planets are also fairly new, because the AI used to just blindly nuke everything when you started with a setup like that and didn't manage each empire personally -- some of Steve's old AARs are basically him writing a novella about his game of six-way space chess in which he played all of the sides.

[Paul]

Yes and no. Finding perfect Earthlikes is rare. Finding colony cost x2 planets is realtively easy. But then it takes a fair bit of work to get the infrastructure, mines, factories, population, garrisons, etc. into place to really utilize them.

I typically work on getting Mars, Luna or Titan up to snuff as a secondary colony first. But if none of them have minerals, then I might look at ditching that and moving out into extrasolar colonies early, especially if there's one or more good ones within 1-2 jumps.

Although at the moment I'm playing a game with a three-empire Earth start (China, the EU, the United States) and as China I'm planning to relocate all population and assets out of the Solar System and setting up an empire around 3-4 systems a couple of jumps away from Earth before the 50-years starting truce wears off. The new capital is Tianhai (Kapteyn's Star II), an Earthlike with 92% ocean and a crapton of minerals (but no Sorium). It's a pain in the butt getting all this ready without jumpgates though (don't want to make it easy for the EU/US to get to me later).

There's no point trying to do it without jumpgates unless you're going to park military ships and blow their jump gate construction ships up when they come. The AI builds jump gate constructors, which do nothing but fly around and make jump gates on everything. So it won't be long before the gates leading to you are constructed anyway.

[Flying Dice]

Letting them build jumpgates is actually advantageous from the tactical perspective. It's been a loooong time since I read up on this, but IIRC:

1. Jumping with a JG imposes much longer jump sickness than assisted or squadron transits.
2. Once a JG is in place NPRs will never use jump tenders for that JP.

In short, if you let them gate it you can park a task group at ideal range and retain a substantial advantage against everything they send through. When you want to return the favor, use tenders for squadron jumps.

[hemperor]

Why in the All Bodies tab , every body in the system is marked as a moon of mercury? and seems like the reduced height windows option in game parameters makes a lot of options missing in some menus like, (e.x Class Design menu won't have  Build and Load Time and Show Civillian Ships options) etc.. somebody here knows if this is normal???

[JOKER_G]

Anyone have ever tried 1 layer armor freighter hull filled with box launchers?